Chen Shui-bian book hits shelves
　

By Ko Shu-ling
STAFF REPORTER
Tuesday, Jan 20, 2009, Page 3
　

Former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) new book, The Cross of Taiwan, hit the shelves yesterday.

In the book he questions former premier Frank Hsieh’s (謝長廷) presidential campaign strategy and insinuates that Hsieh should be held solely responsible for the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) defeat in last year’s presidential election.

The 247-page book is split into two parts: “Long Live Taiwan” and “Prison Conversation.”

“Long Live Taiwan” contains five chapters representing the five stages of his life. They are Rebirth after Death, Striving Upstream, Visions, Persistence on Principles and Taiwan Independence.

“Prison Conversation” is the diary he kept during his pre-trial detention from November until last month and his current imprisonment.

In the chapter Striving Upstream, Chen writes that it was unfair for him to shoulder all the responsibility for the party’s defeat in last year’s presidential election.

“The Democratic Progressive Party’s biggest opponent does not lie on the outside, Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) or the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT),” Chen said. “But it lies on the inside. The party is not united and everybody has his or her own axe to grind.”

Chen cast doubt on Hsieh’s campaign strategy, saying that while his party had initially hoped the KMT would split, they realized the game was up when the KMT remained solidly united.

Ma’s green card status appears to have been the Hsieh campaign’s only issue, Chen said, adding that it was just “one bad show dragging on for too long.”

Everybody wants to struggle upstream, Chen writes, but sometimes a person must make sacrifices in return for a bigger reward and sometimes a person messes up not because the person is stupid, but because he is too intelligent.

In response, Hsieh’s office yesterday issued a statement suggesting that Chen mind his own business because the popularity of the DPP and KMT were evident since the “three-in-one” election in 2005. Besides, Hsieh also shouldered responsibility for the election defeat.

The statement dismissed Chen’s description of his interactions with Hsieh as “false,” but said that Hsieh understood Chen’s state of mind.

“We do not mind as long as it helps the former president,” the statement said. “Hsieh hopes the former president can concentrate on his own legal case, because it is more important.”

China announces second bird flu death this year

AP, BEIJING
Tuesday, Jan 20, 2009, Page 5

A woman in eastern China has died from the H5N1 strain of bird flu, the Chinese Health Ministry said, the second death from the virus this year as Lunar New Year approaches and contact with poultry increases.

The woman, surnamed Zhang, lived in Jinan, Shandong Province. She died on Saturday, the ministry said on its Web site late on Sunday.

The notice did not say how Zhang, 27, who fell sick on Jan. 5, contracted the virus.

A man who answered the telephone at the Shandong health department refused to comment.

The fatality comes less than two weeks after a 19-year-old woman died from the H5N1 virus in a Beijing hospital after buying and cleaning ducks in a market in a neighboring province.

It was the first death from bird flu since last February.

Also yesterday, a two-year-old girl sickened by H5N1 was in critical condition in Shanxi Province.

The cases come at a worrisome time for Chinese authorities as tens of millions of people are on the move between cities and rural hometowns for Lunar New Year.

Dishes prepared from freshly slaughtered chicken and duck feature prominently in celebration feasts, posing a potentially greater risk of exposure to sick birds, the WHO’s Beijing office said.

The WHO said it was prepared to provide assistance to China if asked and urged people to take precautions against bird flu infections by washing their hands after handling raw meat and ensuring that all poultry is well cooked.

While bird flu remains hard for humans to catch — with most cases linked to contact with infected birds — scientists have warned that if outbreaks among poultry are not controlled, the virus may mutate into a form more easily passed between people.

Chinese Health Ministry spokesman Mao Qun’an (毛群安) said last week that the public should minimize contact with poultry, especially sick or dead birds, and that medical institutions should step up surveillance of flu cases, especially during the holiday.

Health officials said the winter months could bring an increase in bird flu cases because the H5N1 virus survives longer in cold weather and has a bigger chance of infecting poultry.

Winter is also when many people in rural areas bring live poultry into their homes to protect them from the cold.

The virus, which has ravaged poultry stocks across Asia since 2003, has continued a path of infection.

Last week, Nepal reported that chickens tested positive for H5N1 there — the first time known instance of the virus in the Himalayan nation.

In Vietnam, animal health officials said they detected the bird flu virus in chickens smuggled from China.

An eight-year-old girl was also reported sick with H5N1 earlier this month, the first human case reported in the country in nearly a year.

According to the latest WHO figures, bird flu has killed 248 people worldwide since 2003.

Divide and be ruled

The birth and death of a nation is almost always a process marked by considerable disagreement, conflict and widespread fear of an unpredictable future.

Key to a lack of consensus are the divisions between those who are politically invested in existing institutions, land and business relationships, and those for whom the status quo means a continuation of either oppression, lack of rights, lack of national recognition or lack of democratic representation.

At these times it is most important that citizens of a new country rally around easily understood and widely shared ideas of what constitute their country’s territory, name and founding tenets.

A sense of national ‘collective consciousness’ is critical if a society is to generate the political legitimacy and social authority necessary to actualize de jure self rule. It is not a process without risk, as delegates representing the thirteen colonies of the future US well understood when, faced with atrocities committed by British troops, they met in the halls of Pennsylvania State House to determine their response.

Even then opposition to a declaration of independence was fierce, especially from the southern states’ delegates who could only envision disaster for their economies and populations in a policy of rising up against the largest of their trading partners and the region’s dominant military power.

The first US vice-president, and later the second president, fought against those who argued for further negotiation with the crown, and it was only casualties from conflicts such as Breeds Hill, Concord and Lexington, along with King’s threat to hang every rebel, that finally convinced Congress to pass the historic resolution that created what would later become the US.

In the TV series John Adams, HBO’s dramatized recreation of the Continental Congress of 1775 has the delegate for Massachusetts turning to those opposing the resolution of independence, among them delegates from Pennsylvania, Virginia and New York, and accusing them directly: “Do you know, the conduct of some states from the beginning of this affair has given me reason to suspect that it is their settled policy to keep to the rear of our confederacy, come what may, so as not to harm their future prospects. There are persons in Philadelphia to whom a ship is dearer than a city, and a few barrels of flour dearer than a thousand lives. Other men’s lives.”

If the Democratic Progressive Party administrations of 2000 until last year did achieve any one substantive goal, it is that a majority of citizens now seem to perceive Taiwan, not China, as the country over which they exercise self determination, as Taiwanese, politically and culturally.

Despite the anti-democratic and obstructionist conduct of some parties and their settled “unificationist” policy of keeping to the rear while delaying the historically just emergence of this nation, an increasing number of Taiwanese are slowly realizing that economic security is not more valuable than national sovereignty, and a few hints of rapprochement are not dearer than the lives, liberty and health of twenty-three million independent people.

BEN GOREN
Taichung

Taiwan can still avoid China’s trap
　

By Sushil Seth
Tuesday, Jan 20, 2009, Page 8

The benefits of economic security and prosperity touted by the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) through Taiwan’s increasing integration into China are nonexistent.

On the other hand, China’s economic growth is slowing down to a point where it is facing a danger of social instability.

Unemployment is going up, and the migrant workers in the cities are heading back home to their rural hinterland, without much prospect of relief there either.

The images of demonstrations by sacked workers on foreign television are only the tip of the iceberg of growing social unrest in the country.

Since there are no institutional channels of protest, the pressure cooker of social unrest is building up steadily with no way of knowing when precisely it might blow up.

One way of dealing with this is for the regime to let competing and alternative political structures function with a view to channel such social pressures into workable and hopeful scenarios.

But this is anathema to the ruling party, fears that will threaten its monopoly on political power.

It is against this dismal backdrop that the Ma administration is going ahead with linking Taiwan’s destiny with an authoritarian and autocratic regime in China.

It is time that the Ma administration rethinks its China strategy before it is too late to extricate Taiwan from this self-destructive path.

Despite its present economic and political problems (nothing compared to China’s mess), Taiwan has been a success story.

And China can learn a thing or two from Taiwan, as Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽) — the ousted, and now departed, communist leader who opposed the military crackdown of the 1989 democracy movement — reportedly said. This might be more instructive for China than seeking to gobble up Taiwan with help from Taiwan’s enablers.

In his conversations with Zong Fengming (宗鳳鳴), Zhao was quoted in Captive Conversations as saying that he admired the late Taiwanese president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) for initiating democratic reform in Taiwan.

He reportedly told Zong: “Chiang Ching-kuo is an amazing person; he deserves to be studied carefully. He followed a world trend and pushed democratic reform on his own.”

Zhao said: “He [Chiang] was educated in the tradition of [Chinese Nationalist Party] KMT one-party rule, and also, for many years in the Soviet Union, in the tradition of Communist one-party rule. That he was able to walk out of these old modes of thought is truly impressive.”

As impressive as it is, China is unlikely to follow that course.

It’s a pity, however, that Chiang’s own party, the KMT, appears to be going in the reverse direction of emulating some of the authoritarian trends of their communist neighbor.

Perry Link has quoted extensively from Zhao’s conversations with Zong in The New York Review of Books.

Zhao said that he believed that “What we [in China] now have is a tripartite group in which the political elite, the economic elite and the intellectual elite are fused,” and they block the country’s political reform to serve their own interests.

Chiang came to favor democracy for China because “the policy of [Chinese President] Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and [Chinese Premier] Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) is only to hand out little favors to the common people in order to bolster their image of ‘caring for the people’ without infringing any serious interests of the elite, let alone changing the system.”

And this, in Zhao’s view, “will not solve the problem.” He felt that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” — the communist monopoly on power — has to go, replacing it with “parliamentary democracy” as the way forward.

Besides, the communist state will increasingly turn to nationalism to rally its people. And Zhao came to see that as “the greatest threat” to China’s “progress toward a modern civilization.”

Notwithstanding all the danger signals, the Ma administration is keen to ride on China’s coattails.

Taipei must know that integration with China cannot be selective. It will be the whole package of China’s political and economic system, perhaps not immediately but over a period of time.

The question then is: what precisely is the compulsion to integrate with China? There are no indications that Taiwanese are keen to be sucked in.

This is something the Ma administration would need to explain to the public.

They certainly didn’t vote the government into power to preside over the dissolution of Taiwan as a sovereign entity.

Hu is already marginalizing that entity by excluding any external input into its affairs. The new political language is one of sorting out minor differences by “Chinese people on both sides,” with the Ma administration apparently comfortable with the new terminology.

And why would they when things are so dismal politically and economically in China?

Even though China’s rulers might not have the sagacity of Taiwan’s Chiang, some of its people are not giving up on democracy despite all the dangers this might involve.

This was evident in the signing of Charter 8 on Dec. 10 by more than 2,000 Chinese nationals to bring about fundamental political change in China. Explaining the dire need for democratic reform in China, the document says: “The political reality, which is plain for anyone to see, is that China has many laws but no rule of law; it has a Constitution but no constitutional government.”

It goes on: “The stultifying results are endemic official corruption, an undermining of the rule of law, weak human rights, decay in public ethics, crony capitalism, growing inequality ... pillage of natural environment as well as of human and historic environments, and the exacerbation of a long list of social conflicts.”

One can only hope that Taiwan is not going the way China is headed by volunteering to commit political hara-kiri.